"One of the widely disseminated stories was that no Jews died in the collapse of the Trade Towers because they had received calls telling them not to go to work that day. To tell you the truth, I got the Jew call. I had an office in the Trade Center where I used to do most of my writing. The call came from former New York mayor Ed Koch. “Al,” he told me, “don’t go to work on the twenty-third day of Elul [September 11, 2001]."
The next lines that he would have said reading from his book and that was cut out of the audio is:
"Actually, I watched the events of that awful day from Minneapolis, where I was visiting my mom. Mom’s in a nursing home, so I was staying at a hotel. That morning, as I grabbed some coffee, I noticed people huddled around the TV. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Must have been a commuter plane. Maybe the pilot had a heart attack or something. Then the second plane hit. It was sickening. Then came the Pentagon. We were under attack. Somehow, I got through to my wife in Manhattan. She was fine at home on the Upper West Side about 5 miles north of the (World) Trade Center. My son was at school on the Upper East Side, my daughter away at college. As I watched the first Tower collapse, I was stunned. But I still couldn’t register the magnitude of what was happening, even as the second one went down. I spent the rest of the day at the nursing home watching TV with my mom."
Al is reading from his book in that YouTube audio
ReplyDelete"One of the widely disseminated stories was that no Jews died in the collapse of the Trade Towers because they had received calls telling them not to go to work that day. To tell you the truth, I got the Jew call. I had an office in the Trade Center where I used to do most of my writing. The call came from former New York mayor Ed Koch. “Al,” he told me, “don’t go to work on the twenty-third day of Elul [September 11, 2001]."
The next lines that he would have said reading from his book and that was cut out of the audio is:
"Actually, I watched the events of that awful day from Minneapolis, where I was visiting my mom. Mom’s in a nursing home, so I was staying at a hotel. That morning, as I grabbed some coffee, I noticed people huddled around the TV. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Must have been a commuter plane. Maybe the pilot had a heart attack or something. Then the second plane hit. It was sickening. Then came the Pentagon. We were under attack. Somehow, I got through to my wife in Manhattan. She was fine at home on the Upper West Side about 5 miles north of the (World) Trade Center. My son was at school on the Upper East Side, my daughter away at college. As I watched the first Tower collapse, I was stunned. But I still couldn’t register the magnitude of what was happening, even as the second one went down. I spent the rest of the day at the nursing home watching TV with my mom."